A Mountain Stream 

Thomas Moran painted "A Mountain Stream" sometime in the nineteenth century. The scene presents a view of untamed nature that, at the time, was becoming ever more scarce, particularly in the Eastern United States. Moran’s style is associated with the Hudson River School, and we might consider him as one of the last inheritors of the picturesque aesthetic. His images create meaning through visual codes of the sublime: nature depicted as powerful, overwhelming, and untouched by industrial progress. We might view the artist as critiquing a society that was rapidly developing, with all the social inequalities that go along with such transformations. To understand Moran's place within American culture, we could start with journals of the period to understand the cultural values and social norms that underpinned artistic production. In the end, Moran's work demonstrates that the meaning of art is always contingent on social and institutional contexts.